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On ideology and the denial of Islamic terror

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An ideology is above all a system of belief into which everything must fit and that therefore assumes a sort of ultimate, absolute knowledge .  This attachment to absolute, over-arching knowledge is why adherents so easily slip into authoritarian thought and behaviour. After all, if you know the core truth or the root causes of what is going on, actual truths presenting themselves to you in reality are of relatively little importance; indeed it is surely right to ignore them and concentrate on the more important underlying truth – even (and perhaps especially ) if it contradicts what you can see and hear in reality. From liberal-left practitioners, we can perhaps see this latter tendency most obviously in the reaction to terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam like those in Paris on Friday night.  The cry goes out that this phenomenon 'is nothing to do with Islam’ or 'has nothing to do with religion’ even when the killers keenly and openly justify th